Biography provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
 
A native of Scotland, Graham arrived in Jerusalem in 1853 as the lay secretary of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews. Already proficient in the calotype, he turned his energies to providing visual evidence of biblical sites. While in Jerusalem and without any commercial motivation, Graham, most of whose negatives are dated 1854 and 1855, freely taught others to calotype. He befriended the Pre-Raphaelite painters William Holman Hunt and Thomas Seddon, both of whom based paintings on his photographs. Hunt especially relied on him, mentioning Graham’s photography in his journals, and Seddon even confessed to his fiancée that he used Graham’s photographs to supply my own want of sketches. In 1856 he took a journey of several months to Egypt, returning to Jerusalem to meet criticism from his religious associates, who accused him, as one wrote in a letter on June 6, of indulging too much in the society of worldly people (such as Hunt and Seddon). Graham returned to Britain in 1857. He showed his photographs in the 1859 Exhibition of Fine Arts in Paris and displayed more than twenty waxed-paper views of Jerusalem in the 1862 International Exhibition in London. Among Graham’s accomplishments are two calotype panoramas of Jerusalem, one in six parts and one in ten parts.
 
Biography provided by the Patrick Montgomery Collection (Archive Farms)
 
James Graham (1806-1869) was a Scottish photographer and lay missionary who arrived in the Jerusalem in 1853 and stayed until 1857. His photographs of Jerusalem and the Holy Land are among some of the earliest paper photographs taken in the region. During his stay in Palestine, Graham photographed the region from Syria and Lebanon in the north to Egypt. He met the artists William Holman Hunt and Thomas Seddon when they visited the Near East, and accompanied them in their journeys, taking photographs while they were painting. Both artists later used his photographs as source material for their paintings.